David Brin is a scientist, public speaker, technical consultant and author of books including The Postman, Startide Rising, The Uplift War and Existence. His novels, translated into more than twenty... Read More »

A recent, fascinating recent study is Decoding Animal Languages, by Con Slobodchikoff. At one level, it is an inspiring demonstration of how new technologies can liberate us from preconceptions and open new avenues of empathy, helping humans to understand the other species who co-inhabit this planet with us.

A number of recent web-notables all seem to revolve (eccentrically) around the question of human evolution. Whether it continues. Whether there is such a thing as "selection in groups." Whether our technological (cyborg) augmentations and/or increasing numbers of "non-neuro-typical" society members portend a new splitting of human destiny. And it looks as if I should have set Existence just five years in the future, instead of 35!

We
live in times of extraordinary discovery. Exoplanets appear to be quite common
in our galaxy. NASA’s Kepler Telescope has identified over 2,000 planetary
candidates orbiting other stars. And yet the universe appears to be silent – at
least when it comes to any detectable signs of alien civilizations, either at
present in our galaxy or their remnants from the last couple of billion
years.

Last week it was asteroid mining, as Peter Diamandis and his partners showed us their bold new venture, Planetary Resources,
aiming eventually to start harvesting trillions of dollars worth of
materials that would then no longer have to be ripped out of Mother
Earth.